Revenue Bond Program Breathes Life into History - Part 2: Dr. and Mrs. Petersen and Dr. Armour - Building a Legacy

The decision had been made to sell revenue bonds to finance a Fort Mackinac museum, and W. Stewart Woodfill, Mackinac Island State Park Commission chairman and owner of Grand Hotel, knew exactly who he wanted to head the project. Young and energetic, Dr. Eugene T. Petersen was the director of the Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing, and he longed to “spend some real money” and make a difference.

 

“In a way the whole thing was foolhardy if not impossible,” Petersen wrote in Inside Mackinac. “I had tentatively agreed, by working part-time, to create a new museum in six months on an island 250 miles away that I had visited for only a few hours. I had no staff, no budget, no collections, and my boss was a man I had talked to for only a half hour.”

 

He agreed to create the new museum at Fort Mackinac while working from Lansing and continuing to run the State Historical Museum. Looking back, it could have been a feat impossible to accomplish, but Petersen wasn’t the average man.

 

It was January 1958, and the warm winds of June would be fast approaching. With few  museum collection items and with no time to build a collection, Petersen, a WWII veteran and former professor of American and Modern European History, decided to use graphic displays such as murals and dioramas to depict life in the fort. In addition, he arranged for loans of several original 19^th-century objects from museums in Detroit and Dearborn. From libraries in Detroit and Ann Arbor, he photocopied maps, Mackinac soldiers’ letters, diaries and visitors’ accounts.

 

“Before I was quite ready, spring arrived,” Petersen noted in Inside Mackinac, “….I gathered the winter’s work together and on April 20, 1958 headed north followed by a very large Allied moving van.”

 

He was met on Mackinac Island by Carl Nordberg, park superintendent, who, with a small budget, ran the 1,800-acre park with its 60 buildings. The superintendent directed Petersen to his new, temporary home in the old fort hospital building. The next day, Petersen stood on the porch of the soldiers’ barracks surrounded by 22 empty museum cases and as many boxes stacked neatly near the main doorway. He had only a few weeks to put it all together.

 

He and his contract crew, assisted by Nordberg and his four full-time park employees, worked day and night to prepare the fort for its reopening. Graffiti on the blockhouse walls was painted over, and an Avenue of Flags was constructed. A chronological exhibit of Fort Mackinac’s history was crafted from a few historical objects and several large murals. Cement sidewalks were laid along the carriage tour road, and long-plastered-over cannon ports in the blockhouses were opened.

 

Petersen had met his deadline. “We opened the new museum in June with little ceremony and on time,” he wrote in Inside Mackinac.

 

With the museum in place, Petersen was prepared to leave the island and get back to his responsibilities at the Michigan Historical Museum. However, Woodfill took for granted that he would stay, and Petersen had already developed a fondness for the island.

 

Soon after, Woodfill asked Petersen a simple question: “Does Mrs. Petersen type?” With those words, Petersen’s wife, Marian, became an integral part of the program. Mrs. Petersen agreed to type letters in her spare time, but that soon led to additional responsibilities, and she became the Park Commission’s office manager, chief fiscal officer and administrative assistant. For the next ten years, Dr. and Mrs. Petersen were the only annual employees of the revenue bond program. 

 

With the seemingly overnight success of the Fort Mackinac museum, the commission turned its attention to the reconstruction of Fort Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City. Preliminary excavation revealed a fort and an entire 18^th-century fur-trading village. The commission authorized another $500,000 in revenue bonds and sold $150,000 worth to get the project started.

 

Petersen was named director in 1966, and to help carry out the ambitious restoration plans of Colonial Michilimackinac, the commission created the new post of deputy director. In 1967, Petersen filled the position with a young, scholarly man named Dr. David A. Armour, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who had written his doctoral dissertation on the 18^th-century fur trade.

 

“Since I was young I’ve always wanted to be involved in managing historic sites,” said Armour. “…Dr. Petersen knew me, and he knew what I could do.”

 

During the summers of 1965-1967, Armour had worked with the archeological and interpretive programs at the parks. He had been assigned to oversee the guides at Fort Mackinac and Colonial Michilimackinc, and it was during this time that he initiated the “living history” interpretive program at the parks, which had caught Petersen’s attention.

 “I found his high principles, sound scholarship, and special skills in dealing with people invaluable,” Petersen wrote in Inside Mackinac. Armour was instrumental in expanding the publications program begun by Petersen and is credited with writing and editing over 75 books, articles and reports about Mackinac.

 

During the next 38 years, Petersen, Armour and a small but dedicated staff of administrators, curators, historians, archaeologists and park operations personnel, with the assistance of contract designers and artists, developed Mackinac State Historic Parks into one of the country’s leading historic site museums. 

 

The sale of revenue bonds had made it all possible, but it was the many men and women who dedicated their lives to historical preservation and restoration who had made it happen. These instrumental individuals looked ahead with vision, and fear was not a word in their vocabulary. The monumental process of creating living history sites, visited by millions of people from around the world, began with a vision and a modest fort museum. The rest, as it’s said, is history.

 

Stay tuned for part 3, to be posted on May 26.